The humanoid robot in the background is Robonaut 2, or R2. An upper body very similar to the one you see in the video was launched to the International Space Station in February of 2011. The climbing legs you see in the video are a more recent addition, having launched on SpaceX-3 in April of last year. Since then, a lot of work has gone into attaching the legs to the upper body, and implementing the software and hardware upgrades required to enable R2 to work as one robot. Much of the future work will be into finding ways that R2 can offload boring or repetitive maintenance tasks that astronauts are now required to do, allowing them to spend more time doing the science that they're there for.
You can find out more here:
http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/st.../robonaut.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robonaut
Robonaut also tweets from space
@Astrorobonaut.
why re-invent the wheel when it still rolls? just make it better. - Tytus Gerrish [more] 
20-02-2015, 12:28
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